Tuesday, May 02, 2006

A bit more information on the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that I briefly mentioned, where Stephen Colbert roasted Bush:

First of all, according to this site, the president was not amused with the whole thing. (Within that article there are links to the video of the roast itself on YouTube, which is in three parts for some reason.)

Second, it was amusing to watch a video on MSN from MSNBC—which has a bit of a conservative bias—trying to spin the story, to try and make it look like Colbert bombed. (Andrea pointed this site out to me; I hope the link continues to work.) Colbert is a hard one for them to handle; he’s not a liberal comedian, he’s a trying-to-look-like-a-conservative comedian. It makes it hard for them to just disagree with him politically, so the best they could do was to try and make it seem like he just wasn’t funny. However, having watched it myself, I found it absolutely hilarious. And, from the clips I saw, the audience did, too; the MSN site edited it to show reactions from the audience (and Bush) not laughing, but in the full video, I think you’ll find that the clips of people not laughing had to have been hand-picked.

Some of my favourite quotes from the roast (from memory, so they are not accurate):

So the president’s approval rating is at 39%. Mr. President, don’t let anyone tell you that the glass is half empty! It’s two-thirds empty. And I wouldn’t drink that last third if I were you; everyone knows that the last third is mostly backwash.

And:

The government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by that standard, we’ve set up a great government in Iraq.

And, as also mentioned on the Truthdig website, he also urged Bush to ignore his approval ratings because they are based on reality, “and reality has a well-known liberal bias.”